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By Michelle Goldberg<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n Opinion Columnist<\/p>\n\n\n\n There is an Elon Musk\u00a0post<\/a>\u00a0on X, his social media platform, that should define his legacy. \u201cWe spent the weekend feeding USAID into the wood chipper,\u201d he wrote on Feb. 3. He could have \u201cgone to some great parties. Did that instead.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Musk\u2019s absurd scheme to save the government a trillion dollars by slashing \u201cwaste, fraud and abuse\u201d has been a failure. DOGE claims it\u2019s saved $175 billion, but experts\u00a0believe<\/a>\u00a0the real number is significantly lower. Meanwhile, according to the Partnership for Public Service, which studies the federal work force, DOGE\u2019s attacks on government personnel \u2014 its firings, re-hirings, use of paid administrative leave and all the associated lack of productivity \u2014 could\u00a0cost<\/a>\u00a0the government upward of $135 billion this fiscal year, even before the price of defending DOGE\u2019s actions in court. Musk\u2019s rampage through the bureaucracy may not have created any savings at all, and if it did, they were negligible.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Now, Musk\u2019s Washington adventure is coming to an end, with the disillusioned billionaire announcing that he\u2019s leaving government behind. \u201cIt sure is an uphill battle trying to improve things in D.C., to say the least,\u201d he told<\/a> The Washington Post.<\/p>\n\n\n\n There is one place, however, where Musk, with the help of his minions, achieved his goals. He did indeed shred U.S.A.I.D. Though a rump operation is now operating inside the State Department, the administration says that it has terminated more than 80 percent of U.S.A.I.D. grants. Brooke Nichols, an associate professor of global health at Boston University, has estimated that these cuts have already resulted in about 300,000 deaths<\/a>, most of them of children, and will most likely lead to significantly more by the end of the year. That is what Musk\u2019s foray into politics accomplished.<\/p>\n\n\n\n White House officials deny that their decimation of U.S.A.I.D. has had fatal consequences. At a hearing in the House last week, Democrats confronted Secretary of State Marco Rubio with my colleague Nick Kristof\u2019s reporting<\/a> from East Africa, documenting suffering and death caused by the withdrawal of aid. Rubio insisted no such deaths have happened, but people who\u2019ve been in the field say he\u2019s either lying or misinformed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Atul Gawande, an assistant administrator for global health at U.S.A.I.D. in Joe Biden\u2019s administration, told me that during a trip to Kenya last week, he visited the national referral hospital. There\u2019s been a major increase in the number of patients with advanced H.I.V. symptoms, a result of losing access to antiretroviral medication. At refugee camps on the border of South Sudan, food aid has been cut so severely that people are getting less than 30 percent of the calories they need. \u201cIt is not enough to survive on, and that has caused skyrocketing levels of severe malnutrition and deaths associated with it,\u201d said Gawande.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Musk apparently did not anticipate that it would be bad PR for the world\u2019s richest man to take food and medicine from the world\u2019s poorest children. The Post reported<\/a> that he hadn\u2019t foreseen \u201cthe intensity of the blowback to his role in politics over the past year.\u201d He\u2019s been doing a series of interviews that Axios called<\/a> an \u201cimage rehab tour.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Know someone who would want to read this? Share the column.<\/p>\n\n\n\n If there were justice in the world, Musk would never be able to repair his reputation, at least not without devoting the bulk of his fortune to easing the misery he\u2019s engendered. Musk\u2019s sojourn in government has revealed severe flaws in his character \u2014 a blithe, dehumanizing cruelty, and a deadly incuriosity. This should shape how he\u2019s seen for the rest of his public life.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Musk sometimes refers to people he holds in contempt as \u201cNPCs,\u201d videogame speak for characters who aren\u2019t controlled by players and thus have no agency. More than just an insult, the term, I think, reveals something about his worldview. He either doesn\u2019t view most other people as entirely real or doesn\u2019t see the point of treating them as such. As he told Joe Rogan this year, \u201cThe fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy,\u201d referring to the emotion as a \u201cbug\u201d in our system.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Yet even as he prides himself on dispassionate rigor, Musk has proved remarkably uninterested in figuring out how the government that he sought to transform really works. Samantha Power, head of U.S.A.I.D. under Biden, told me she tried to speak with members of the new administration, hoping to convince them there were elements of U.S.A.I.D.\u2019s work that they could leverage for their own agenda. But aside from one meeting with a transition official, her outreach was ignored.<\/p>\n\n\n\n![\"Elon](\"https:\/\/static01.nyt.com\/images\/2025\/05\/30\/multimedia\/30goldberg-fkmt\/30goldberg-fkmt-articleLarge.jpg?quality=75&auto=webp&disable=upscale\")